If a bull market can turn a moron into a genius, the art market deserves government funding. It has done for the elite what the housing boom has done for the lumpen. They all think they deserve a Nobel Prize. What a delight for the art-mongers! The buyers’ pockets are full, their heads are empty, and the coast is clear.
Today’s artist has a special status: he is the rebel who gets invited to all the best parties, the icon-buster who peddles his own shoddy images for worship and glorification. He has no visible talent except for self-promotion. In short, he is a humbug.
Artists have always been critics of the times they lived in. When Dante drew his picture of Hell, he made sure to put into it all the leading citizens of his day. The artist’s task was to draw out the beautiful from the bilge of contemporary life.
But cometh the 21st century and the artist has a new role. He is the Arbiter of Cool. He is the bouncer at the local hotspot who gets to tell the customers if they’re hip enough to come in. At his traditional role he has become incompetent, unable to distinguish between the sordid and the noble. He can’t even criticise, because he lacks an aesthetic frame of reference. All he can be is a provocateur, irritating the bourgeoisie.
In this he is abetted by a whole gang of promoters, curators and critics. One of them stumbles across some no-account brush-wielder and promotes him to his friends in the museums. The friends bring in the critics, who claim to have discovered the great one before he became great. And at the end of this assembly line, weak-minded collectors and greedy investors are lured into paying enormous prices.
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